Thai Hard

Andy Ricker takes Pok Pok to New York. Do his wings have a prayer?

GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM: Ike’s wings and a drinking vinegar on the Lower East Side.

IMAGE: Jeffrey Gray Brandsted

What Ricker also has going for him is his obsessive nature—and his take on the cuisine of Northern Thailand.

“I never met a guy
more driven,” says his friend Willy Vlautin, a musician and novelist who
worked for Ricker as a house painter in the ’90s. “He grew up pretty
poor, and I think he wanted to not be that way. He’s one of those guys
who had to work twice as hard to get where other people were in the
first place.”

A native of Vermont,
Ricker had been cooking since he was 16, working in restaurants in order
to make money to ski. Later he got into rock climbing, and took cooking
jobs on sailboats so he could climb all around the world.

In 1987, when he was
24, Ricker went to Chiang Mai, the largest city in Northern Thailand,
where he ate a curry that changed his life. The bowl was filled with hed top, seasonal mushrooms that he remembers “look like puffballs—dark brown, slightly bitter.”

He thought Thai food
was supposed to be sweet, like the sugary pad kee mao served stateside.
But this was a bounty of distinct flavors—bitter and earthy and sour and
sweet—combined to make hearty mountain food served as snack-sized bits,
often with a the undercurrent of fish-sauce funk. It was seemingly
contradictory items like “beef salad.” It was great.

When Ricker moved to
Portland in 1990, he worked as a sous chef under Chris Israel at
Zefiro—a training ground for many of Portland’s best cooks—and worked as
a commercial painter, eventually giving new paint jobs to several
restaurants where he’d worked.

But he kept making
Northern Thai recipes. His best friend, photographer Adam Levy, liked
Thai food, but the kind that most Americans know. “He always used to
harsh my buzz, “ Levy says. “He knew what I was eating was the insipid
honky formulation—Chinese food with a few different ingredients. We’d
actually have fights about it.”

In 2005, Ricker
bought a house on Southeast Division Street, and out front built a
wooden shack with a kitchen and to-go window. He maxed out several
credit cards and borrowed money from his mother to make payroll.

He rejected the conventional fare—no pad Thai on his menu.

“Think about how
alienating Pok Pok could have been,” says Kurt Huffman, who later
co-opened restaurants Ping and Foster Burger with Ricker. “Nothing you
can pronounce. Nothing you recognize. Weird flavors. You don’t go out
and say, ‘Let’s open up an Italian place that refuses to serve
spaghetti, and everything on the menu’s gonna be in Italian.’”

But
Pok Pok wasn’t off-putting. Actually, it was a food cart before
Portland’s cart scene got big, and it served finger-licking chicken.
People started telling each other immediately: Ricker had been to
Thailand, and he’d brought back something out of a dream. “The
charcoal-roasted game hen is killer,” wrote Oregonian food critic
Karen Brooks six months after Pok Pok opened, “full of juiciness and
crisp skin, with a tart, garlic-dizzy dipping sauce to kick it higher.”

What saved Ricker
were those rotisserie game hens and Ike’s wings—a dish named for Ich
Truong, an employee who helped perfect the recipe that made Pok Pok
famous.

With
Ike’s wings, Ricker hit upon a trifecta of food cravings: meat, spice
and sweetness. The wings are huge: Each one includes the full extension
of the bird’s appendage—drumstick, flat and end joint—making them far
larger than the typical Buffalo wing.

They’re
marinated in garlic, sugar and fish sauce, tossed in tempura batter,
and fried in hot oil. Then they’re painted with garlic and a fish-sauce
caramel. They play to Portland’s love of artisan quality, exotic
snobbery and decadent indulgence. They’re a recipe for addiction.

A 45-minute wait for a
Pok Pok table soon became typical, and Ricker expanded. He opened
Whiskey Soda Lounge across Division Street in 2009, serving dried
cuttlefish and cocktails made with Thai drinking vinegars.

He also opened
Southeast Asian pub-grub restaurant Ping in Chinatown in 2009 with
Huffman, and they launched Foster Burger a year later with Sel Gris’
Daniel Mondok. There’s a second takeout joint, Pok Pok Noi, in the Sabin
neighborhood, and Ricker is working on a third Division Street
restaurant dedicated solely to the curry-on-rice dishes called khao kaeng.

He has 120 people on his payroll.

Ricker soon found
himself acclaimed as one of the nation’s best Thai chefs. He has become
an evangelist for obscure Northern Thai favorites like laap, a duck dish, and khao soi, a curry-broth and noodle bowl.

“To this date,”
Ricker says, “the vast majority of the Thai community in Portland
believe I have a Thai wife. Either here in the United States or in
Thailand, behind the scenes, running all this.”

“I
don’t have a problem with any Westerner presenting himself or herself as
an authority on Northern Thai cuisine,” she says. “But that
person—Western or Thai, it doesn’t matter—has to be right. It’s like if
someone is a football commentator and they confuse Ben Roethlisberger
with Tom Brady.”

In New York’s Lower East Side, customers flow in and out
of Pok Pok Wing on a Thursday night as Matthew Adams eavesdrops on every
conversation at the counter. He knows exactly what he wants to hear.

Adams is Ricker’s
operations manager, first hired at Ping and running three of his boss’s
Portland restaurants. He’s in New York to supervise Pok Pok Wing’s
opening weeks. He knows working in Ricker’s restaurants is hazardous: In
his first year at Ping, Adams gained 20 pounds.

Adams listens as cashier Taylor Warden takes orders.

“Would you like sticky rice?” Warden asks a customer.

Adams pulls him aside later to correct his delivery: “Would you like to order sticky rice?” Otherwise, Adams says, customers might think the rice is free.

Warden hands a mother
and daughter at the counter their drinking vinegars—like a tart fruit
syrup in soda water—and says, “Stir it a little.”

DINNER AT EIGHT: Papaya Pok Pok is crushed with a pestle and served on marble counters.

IMAGE: Jeffrey Gray Brandsted

They gave their drinks a light swish with their straws. Adams corrects again: “You want to give it a good stir.”

This is part of Ricker’s plan: close supervision and tight control over every aspect of the Pok Pok meal.

“To be able to come
to one of the most difficult cities to open a restaurant, and to do it
in two months, that’s pretty impressive,” Ricker says. “And it’s not
because of any Herculean strength on my part. Everything we do has been
about minimizing or eliminating everything that can go wrong.”

For example, take the
chilies used in the restaurant’s namesake dish, Papaya Pok Pok. The
name comes from the sound the chef’s mortar on pestle—pok pok, pok pok—as it crushes long beans, tamarind, Thai chili, garlic, fish sauce, palm sugar and peanuts with green papaya shavings.

The
heat of the chilies changes seasonally, and they come from a dozen or
more places in Asia. That means the dish requires a constant rebalancing
of the recipe.

“And the only one who’s capable of doing that is Andy,” Levy says.

Ricker’s dreams are moving beyond the place where that kind of control is possible.

He has a cookbook
coming out this year—still untitled—and is retailing the drinking
vinegars under the name Som. He wants to open a shop to sell ingredients
and equipment—laap spice, steamers, rice baskets—to go with the
recipes. He talks of opening Pok Pok Wing outlets across New York, like a
Thai version of Shake Shack.

“You could
potentially open these all over the city,” he says of Pok Pok Wing. “You
could have a central commissary that functions as a particle
accelerator. This place on the Lower East Side is totally a science
experiment.”

Yet as Ricker
stretches himself further and further, he remains fundamentally alone in
understanding his operation. He sold his share of Ping and Foster
Burger last year, to solely focus on Pok Pok.

“That’s
also, I think, why he’s so attached to the idea of the wing shack,”
Huffman says. “It allows you to be excellent. The question is, can he
get enough people to help him build this thing as big as he wants?”

Ricker
is trying to spread the expertise. He has taken at least six members of
his staff to Thailand with him. And among his employees, he inspires
fierce loyalty. When Pok Pok threw a Christmas party last year, nearly
all of his 120 employees wore temporary tattoos of the illustration that
ran with the Bon Appétit article: Ricker riding a fish.

When
it comes to Pok Pok, Huffman says of Ricker, “He is the source of
truth. The only way to scale that is to have people who work for him who
are also a source of truth.”

Ricker knows he’s got to back away from the kitchen.

“You don’t see a lot
of old chefs,” he says. “I’d like to live to at least 60. There’s plenty
of people out there who can do this. I know I’m not the only person in
the whole world who’s interested.”

To achieve the
national brand he wants, Ricker will have to release control of his
cooking. But sometimes it seems like Pok Pok won’t let go of him.

Near midnight, Ricker
returns to Pok Pok Wing after dealing with problems at the unopened
shop in Brooklyn. He and Adams look proudly over the pile of receipts.
Adams spots an anomaly. “There’s a Portland number on here,” he says.

Ricker looks closer at the receipts. The two men reach a realization simultaneously, and start to laugh.

For Pok Pok Wing’s first 10 days in business, Ricker has been giving the citizens of New York his personal cellphone number.

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

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